There is quite a bit of buzz already in the Gulf Region regarding God Save My Shoes and several press articles have been published already, including an exclusive interview of Julie Benasra the film Director. Shoes being one of the most sought after accessories in the Emirates (one of the only one that can be displayed openly regardless of the dress code) this is no wonder there is such an anticipation of our film’s release.

The Abu Dhabi Film Festival was created in 2007 and takes place this year from October 13^thto the 22^nd. God Save My Shoes is being screened in the Showcase category on October 18^thand 20^th in presence of Julie Benasra the Director, and Thierry Daher the Producer.

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Finally! A little more than three weeks after the world premiere in NYC, God Save My Shoes will be screening at the Max Linder in Paris on Friday, September 30^th in front of 500+ people.

The event is sponsored by www.Sarenza.com, France’s #1 shoe selling website and will also act as a fundraiser for Soles4Souls (www.soles4souls.org): for each fabulous pair of shoes walking through the door, Sarenza and Soles4Souls will give a pair of shoes to someone in need. Much press and media is expected attend this much expected event. The screening will be followed by an after party at the Social Club, Rue Montmartre, steps from the theatre.

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The Premiere will be followed by an invitation-only after party, which will take place at LAVO, one of NY’s hottest clubs located at 39 East 58th Street, New York, NY 10022-1617.

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The Drone is a “real-life flying video game”. Operating as a small helicopter with a built in camera that is controlled wirelessly via an iPhone or iPad.

Caid Productions took up the challenge and the results are these fun videos and beautiful images of the drone flying all over NYC’s five boroughs, its skyline and famous landmarks. We were lucky to have Nicolas Halftermeyer the web and e-commerce Director for the brand on the team, to pilot the drone and navigate it through high winds and busy city streets.

The whole crew was very excited to be part of such an adventurous and fun shoot, Charlie Wing the director came up with a list of great locations and we started the day shooting against a wall of graffiti in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, the idea was to get the drone to follow a realistic path through Brooklyn and in to Manhattan.

After Greenpoint we headed to a junk yard where the drone flew over heaps of scrap metal and all sorts of industrial materials. This location was quite a challenge to shoot in due to the high winds and crazy machinery operating all around us! The drone then flew through williamsburg and down to dumbo where we took shots of the magnificent Manhattan skyline at sunset. Then the drones flew to Manhattan to have a memorable battle in snowy Central Park…

A real cool toy if you ask us!

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After two years in production, we are thrilled to announce the upcoming release of our latest feature documentary, “God Save My Shoes”. “God Save My Shoes” is produced in collaboration with Canal Plus (www.canal-plus.fr), Europe’s #1 paid-TV network. An exact release date has not yet been set.

“God Save My Shoes” is the first documentary film to explore the intimate relationship between women and shoes. The film attempts to understand what makes shoes the most seductive and addictive item in a woman’s closet, and how an article of clothing designed to protect the feet has come to outshine all other accessories in the world of fashion.

The quest to decipher the fiery emotions that shoes arouse in women (and in not a few men) took the filmmakers to New York, Los Angeles, Paris, Toronto, and Milan to interview designers, extreme shoe collectors, foot fetishists, psychologists, celebrities, and everyday women about their passionate and often turbulent relationship with footwear. What they emerged with is a fascinating portrait of the history and cultural significance of shoes—from ancient elevated soles to today’s skyscraping stilettos, from Marilyn Monroe to Sex & the City—and surprising revelations about how shoes have come to occupy such a revered place in modern pop culture.

For the film, “God Save My Shoes” Director Julie Benasra interviewed such pop culture icons as burlesque dancer Dita Von Teese, Fergie of the Black Eyed Peas, former Destiny’s Child singer Kelly Rowland, and Baroness Von Neumann. She also turned to Filipa Fino of Vogue USA, Caroline de Fayet of ELLE magazine in Paris, Moulin Rouge dancers, fashion historian Valerie Steele, and star fashion designers including Christian Louboutin, Manolo Blahnik, Walter Steiger, Pierre Hardy, Vivienne Westwood, Bruno Frisoni, and Robert Clergerie.

Even with a festival premier date as yet unset, God Save My Shoes has global distribution in place with TV partners in France, Germany, the UK, Brazil, Finland, and Israel, as well as strong interest from several US TV networks. We’ll keep you posted on when our film will come strutting onto a screen near you.

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We live in conservative times. Ostentation is out. Arrogance isout. Risk is definitely out.

Cars are getting smaller, less flashy, and more fuel-efficient. Slender and pale is in, muscled and tan is out. Sport jackets have made a comeback for men, as have dresses and hats for women. With our economy on life-support, Democrats and Republicans fight to prove who is more fiscally conservative. A recent survey revealed that, for perhaps the first time ever, a majority of young people say they are more attracted to brains than beauty. Suddenly, being boringly sensible is hot. In a word:

Stodgy is Sexy.

With Stodgy is Sexy, Caid Productions is presenting an original documentary series and interactive web project that explores this unique moment in our culture through a variety of media, including blog posts, user discussions, and video. The focal point of the website www.StodgyIsSexy.com is a documentary web series, each installment of which provides a brief portrait of an individual who embodies the Stodgy|Sexy trend. These are men and women from across a range of fields and disciplines – medicine, manufacturing, advertising, design – who have achieved success, sometimes spectacularly, through adherence to traditional values of thrift, diligence, rationality, conservatism, and basic common sense. Each 3-minute portrait focuses on a single individual and attempts, in that short span of time, to uncover some of the links between the subject’s stodginess and his or her success.

The web series is produced by Caid Productions and sponsored by WT Direct bank (www.wtdirect.com), with individual webisodes released on the website on a rolling basis. Users are invited to participate in the project by commenting on the episodes and uploading their own content to the site.

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Thierry Daher, formerly CEO of Vanksen USA, will continue serving as President and Executive Producer of Caid Productions. Thierry founded Caid Productions in 2003 and co-founded Vanksen USA in 2007, joining the two companies’ forces for the last few years.  Says Daher, “We are thrilled to be positioned at the forefront of social media marketing while bringing to the table our considerable experience in web content creation and film production. We believe our combination of expertise is a unique offering that will continue strengthening our collaboration with our US clients”. Daher adds, “we remain on excellent terms with our former partners at Vanksen: this move was made collaboratively and out of respect for both parties’ interests.”

Caid Productions will remain at the offices previously occupied by Vanksen on West 20^th Street in Manhattan, and key personnel will remain the same.

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Written by Emmanuel Vivier, Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Vanksen and Thierry Daher, CEO of Vanksen USA and Executive Producer of Caid Productions, the report can be viewed online on Culture-Buzz.com.

You can also download the full report by clicking on this LINK.

Enjoy!!!

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When Muppets storm the web for a noble cause, who can resist?

Unless you’re utterly allergic to pink piglet divas and sensible frogs, you probably enjoyed The Muppet Show and its various iterations. Earlier last year, our friends from Disney (which acquired The Muppets in 2004) asked us to come up with an idea to kick off their new campaign: “Give a Day, Get a Disney Day.” The idea is simple and heart-warming: give a day of your time, volunteering with one of the hundreds of charities registered with Points of Light (http://www.pointsoflight.org/), and in exchange you’ll get a free day at Disney Land Resort or Walt Disney World.

We (in partnership with our sister company Vanksen USA) came up with a crazy concept (in line with our Muppet heroes), in which the Muppets personally ask you to help others – and possibly destroy a website or two along the way. We won’t ruin the surprise and tell you about the film before you watch it, but if you’re interested, check it out at www.disneyparksgive.com/customize.php.

This concept was just as crazy to produce, sending us from Disney Studios in California (that was the nice part), to our animation shop in NY – not to mention Europe and Japan, for technology bits and pieces. The result was a multi-layer interactive campaign that surprises viewers, even after viewing it a second, or third, time! (That’s a hint).

One interesting component is a video teaser we created exclusively for bloggers, where Kermit promotes your blog (http://www.disneyparksgive.com/spread-embed.php). We also came up with embeddable banners, personalized email, etc.

The campaign launched in early January, but its results continue to amaze us. While we can’t provide traffic details, it’s pretty obvious the Muppets rule the web: several hundred blogs have adopted the video, and the volunteer spirit is spreading fast. Rumor has it that Disney is well on its way to tackling the 1 million volunteers it aimed to enlist.

Stays tuned for more Muppets extravaganza as the story keeps unfolding – and yes, feel free to spread the spirit if you’re in the mood to do something good (http://www.disneyparksgive.com/spread-email.php)!

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When a viral conceives a TV commercial, drives store traffic…and helps a good cause!

Sound like the Swiss knife of marketing 2.0? That’s actually an apt metaphor.

There was a time when brands and major agencies would approach viral marketing agencies like us (CAID Productions, in partnership with our sister company Vanksen USA) with their glossies TV commercials and ask if we could make them “viral.” Our answer was always the same (“pfffff,” … followed by):  “You cannot make something viral out of a TV commercial unless it has been conceived as a viral from the start. People do not forward sales pitches, they pass along entertainment!”  

It finally seems that our preaching has been heeded (at least in some cases). One of our recent campaigns serves as a good example of this novelty, taking the opposite path and bringing a true viral to TV screens (to everyone’s satisfaction, we should add).

In Fall 2009, SEARS outerwear company Lands’ End asked us to come up with a creative concept for a web-based viral campaign. The objective was to encourage people to donate gently-used coats to Lands’ End shops in order to help the 8,000 homeless people of Boston, MA. The effort was titled “Big Boston Warm Up.” (www.bigbostonwarmup.com). 

 We created a short-format video (timed at 1:30 for the web) depicting the lifecycle of a coat (and its owner), using stop motion effects. The video depicts the moment a snappy new coat is offered to a young man, who wears it through his college years, his first job, the first date with his (eventual) wife, and the arrival of his kids. Finally the coat is donated to Big Boston Warm Up, where it passes into the hands of a grateful homeless person — and a meaningful new destiny.

We personalized the video’s ending, making the call-to-action more memorable to viewers: their names appeared on the label of the donated coat. We also developed custom modules, allowing the spread of the video on Twitter and Facebook.

When Lands’ End’s top management saw the video, they were so excited that they took the campaign national, renaming it “Big Nation Warm Up.” They also decided to run a 30-second version of the piece on TV! In this case, we went from Viral to television — which seems to be the way to go in the 21^st century, if only because an effort that first goes viral online enables you to forecast the sentiments of a larger number of people – thereby justifying the higher cost of a TV ad.

Additionally, the campaign had a built-in means of driving traffic to stores, since users had to bring their coats to Lands’ End shops nationwide in order to donate them. The results? We beat the odds in Boston, with Lands’ End collecting more coats than the total number of homeless people in the city. Nationwide, donations topped 30,000 coats in total.

What’s at the end of all that math? — an ROI positive campaign, a defining moment for the brand, and 30,000 homeless folks who will be warmer this winter than they would have been otherwise. Way to go viral!

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